Communism and socialism are experiencing a resurgence in the West and are part and parcel of former revolutionary movements in South Africa. What do the supporters hope for?
Both Stalin and Mao are responsible for many more deaths than Hitler; 15-20 million and 20-65 million respectively, versus 6 million. It turns out the Nazis exterminated 7.44% of their population, while the Soviets managed 8.9% and Mao approximately 7% (best estimate). The Khmer Rouge managed to cause the deaths of 12.5% of Cambodia’s population. To put that into perspective, Russia lost 15% of its soldiers during the First World War, so living under communism is between 50-80% as dangerous as being on one of the deadliest battlefields in modern history.
How did they justify this murder? Stalin was known to mutter “Who will remember or care about these people in a few years?” as he signed execution orders for lists containing thousands.
Bertrand Russell remarked that Lenin had laughed when confronted on the ethics of large-scale state killings. He regarded terror as an essential aspect of maintaining Communism in the face of its unpopularity, and not as an aberration of Marxism at all. Apart from mass executions, starvation was the main tool, and they went to great lengths to justify it.
Consider this quote from Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin:
As Stalin interpreted the disaster of collectivization in the last weeks of 1932, he achieved a new height of ideological daring. The famine in Ukraine, whose existence he had admitted earlier, when it was far less severe, was now a “fairy tale,” a slanderous rumour spread by enemies. Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat…Stalin never personally witnessed the starvations that he so interpreted, but comrades in Soviet Ukraine did… Forced to interpret distended bellies as political opposition, they produced the utterly tortured conclusion that the saboteurs hated socialism so much that they intentionally let their families die. Even the starving themselves was sometimes presented as enemy propagandists with a conscious plan to undermine socialism. Young Ukrainian communists in the cities were taught that the starving were enemies of the people “who risked their lives to spoil our optimism.”
China’s story is similar. Ethically, how far away from Hitler’s justification of The Final Solution is that?
As murderous
Communists were every bit as murderous as the Nazis, and their justifications were just as revolting. Communism requires oppressive force. Achieving equality of outcomes between people with diverse talents, interests and willingness to contribute is impossible without it.
Let’s look at other aspects of welfare. How about freedom? Communist regimes put the most unproductive and entitled in charge. They condemn large numbers of people to slavery, only, now, de facto slaves are state rather than private property. That makes it OK then?
Freedom of thought or conscience in communist states didn’t exist. Like Nazis oppressing ‘Jewish science’ Soviets oppressed ‘bourgeois science’ (especially genetics). Chinese and Cambodian communists tried to exterminate educated people on the grounds of their bourgeois views. Communists everywhere would punish those who owned Western books. They suppressed or controlled religion, the basis for morality for many.
How about eking out a living?
Economies end up sluggish at best, or usually smaller, whenever Communism is tried. Many countries experienced periodic famines where other countries didn’t – even in Africa and Asia. Two interesting natural experiments control for just about everything that could be confounding explanatory variables. These were East and West Germany and North and South Korea.
West and East Germany both started with a GDP per capita of $14,987 (2009 dollars) in 1949 but ended up with $34,116 and $19,685 in 1990. East Germany (the cream of communist economies) only managed to increase its productive capacity by 31% in 41 years, while West Germany added 128% – 4.07 times as much. Over the full 41-year communist period East Germany produced 41.2% of the income per capita that West Germany. The difference amount to $37,0210.6 per person.
Far dirtier
In Germany that is the equivalent of 2.11 new houses per person. Furthermore, the West did not pay for this via pollution because the East’s economy was far dirtier.
North and South Korea adopted more hardcore communist and capitalist systems than East and West Germany respectively, so the difference is even more dramatic.
In 1972 the two Korea’s had the same GDP per capita of $8,255.8 (in 2023 dollars), but merely 7 years later North Korea had dropped to $3,360.2 – a contraction rate of 10.6% per year. North Korea’s economy has continued to contract ever since to only $640 per person in 2023. Communism has destroyed 92.5% of North Korea’s productive capacity so far.
Meanwhile capitalism increased South Korea’s productive capacity more than 4.3-fold over the same period. As a result, North Korea is only 1.8% as productive as South Korea today. The difference in production over 51 years amounts to a difference of $739,693 per person – enough for every North Korean to aspire to a Gangnam style home in Seoul.
While the rest of the world industrialized on the back of increased agricultural productivity which freed farming labour for industry, the communist world often tried to industrialise while their collective farms lost productivity. Hence the latter’s food shortages.
They also did silly things like tear up existing railways or melt down perfectly usable implements to make steel.
Nobel prize-winning economists have argued that it is impossible to allocate resources efficiently by central planning. No central planner could possibly consider all local conditions or opportunities or the diversity of values and needs, no matter how smart or how many super computers it has.
Unsurprisingly
Central planning results in stuff that nobody really wants and a huge amount of waste. Unsurprisingly communism turns out to be relatively unproductive.
Ironically Marx himself told us that capitalism is massively more productive than any other economic system. Today the poorest 10% in the economically most free countries are 7.5 times better off than the poorest 10% in the least free.
The lesson is clear. If you care about anyone, especially the poor and downtrodden, avoid communism and communism-lite, known as socialism.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/worker-and-kolkhoz-woman-monument-2499826/]
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